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Nothing beats the good old SB/Adlib FM sound, for what regards music ;-)

Even with a "non-oldskool" PCI card, as long as it has an FM chip, you should get an "oldskool" sound.

Note: some clone cards did weird things with the sound channels and timbres e.g. stereo sound out of Adlib settings (anybody remembers those sad soundblaster clones that at most could emulate a v1.0 22 KHz mono soundblaster...sometimes?)

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Nothing beats the good old SB/Adlib FM sound, for what regards music ;-)

Utter nonsense. Just because most users back in 1993 were unable to afford a good sound card doesn't mean that the crap they were forced to use is supposed to define any standard for music quality. The MP2's quite well represent the hardware the music was made for.

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Graf Zahl said:
The MP2's quite well represent the hardware the music was made for.

The music was made for a range of hardware, including of course what users would be using for years (Sound Blasters.) While RottingZombie asked for the MP2 sound, I agree with Maes anyway; the MP2s sound too "recorded-like" or sharp. The synthetic and more vibrant sound of the Sound Blaster embeds itself more fittingly into the software-rendered game. Of what I've tried, the only alternative I've found that gave a similar vibe is TiMidity with these patches. Incidentially Doom v1.9 supports GUS cards, as well.

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Utter nonsense. Just because most users back in 1993 were unable to afford a good sound card doesn't mean that the crap they were forced to use is supposed to define any standard for music quality. The MP2's quite well represent the hardware the music was made for.

I lol'd. Especially the part about the MP2's being a good representation of the hardware the music was made for. Even with all the audio crap that I'm sitting in (and on in the case of my subwoofer) I have never heard a midi sound like those MP2's. Good representation indeed.

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Graf Zahl said:
The MP2's quite well represent the hardware the music was made for.

Too bad all but one of the files are in mono. (MAP31 is in stereo, presumably to show off the panning on the footstep effect.)

And despite the .mp2 extension, every piece of software I have identifies them as layer-3 (i.e. MP3) files...

myk said:
Of what I've tried, the only alternative I've found that gave a similar vibe is TiMidity with these patches. Incidentially Doom v1.9 supports GUS cards, as well.

TiMidity++ is supposed to sound as close as possible to a real GUS, so this probably represents the best that an average user could have heard in the mid-1990s without spending an arm and a leg on an external MIDI module.

On the other hand, most people would have first heard the tunes on a Sound Blaster using FM synthesis; I know it sounds the most natural to me (and is my favourite -- I should get out my old SBPro and record the output).

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Too bad all but one of the files are in mono. (MAP31 is in stereo, presumably to show off the panning on the footstep effect.)

And despite the .mp2 extension, every piece of software I have identifies them as layer-3 (i.e. MP3) files...

I never said that the quality of these files is good (which indeed it isn't.) Obviously the equipment that was used to convert them into digital wave sound was sub-standard. But these are actual recordings made with sound hardware that was considered good back when Doom was made and I'd really like to get a recording with the same hardware in better quality.

As for Timidity++, I haven't found a set of instrument patches yet that makes Doom's music sound good. The quality of Heretic's music is mostly excellent with it but I always have the feeling that something is missing in most Doom tunes.

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The reason I want this is because back when I first got doom on my Mom's 486DX, we didn't have sound so I was playing with the "PC Speaker" bleeps and bloops. Kind of weird the game still freaked me out. Yet I would play it at friends houses and hear beautiful music that I am almost positive sounded better then than it does now (at least with the 2 pcs i have which have onboard sound/midi tables).

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Most of those onboard sound chipsets quite shitty and often sound even worse than FM synthesis.

If you like the MP2's you can try a source port that can use them directly. ZDoom can and since Legacy also uses FMOD it will probably, too, but I'm not 100% sure about that. You could also try Timidity with ZDoom. If you find a good set of instrument patches this will probably give the best sound quality you can get on an average system today.

Those AC'97 and derivative "sound cards" are nothing more than a simple DAC/ADC:
they have a small number of audio channels from 2 (stereo) to 6 (5.1 surround and the multi voice emulation and downmixing in the case of MIDI music and game is done entirely in software, like a modplayer, using midi patches as samples, like a poor man's wavetable of some sort.

Too bad that the current "MIDI emulation" drivers for AC'97 are among the LEAST optimized modplayers ever coded :-(

It's not true they sound worse than FM syntesis, but they managed to make them sound actually WORSE than an 8-bit MOD file, and consume considerably more CPU horsepower (just try playing a 32-channel MOD or S3M file with any decent modplayer: minimal CPU impact < 1%, then try playing a crappy midi: a whooping 10% CPU utilisation on a 3 GHz machine!)

LOL, it's ridicolous that MIDI playback, which was once considered the most lightweight task for a soundcard (just a few hundred bytes of instructions per seconds) is now a major pain in the ass requiring "hardware acceleration" :-)

Anyway, Doom's FM music was relatively OK compared to other games of the time, it has a great nostalgia value to the point that ZDoom and its variants even include OPL2/OPL3 FM emulation as an alternative to MIDI :-)

What let me down somehow, was that at least with DOS Doom I never noticed any audible enhancement in music when I switched from a SB v2.0 (8-bit, single OPL2 chip) to a SB16 (16-bit, OPL3 stereo chip with more FM operators), despite using the -opl3 parameter :-(

Anyway, for a truly oldskool sound, FM synthesis should provide you with all the "oldskool" feeling you could ever wish for, using a MT2 or similar oldskool wavetable is purely optional :-)

The GUS...hmm, dunno how good it was at MIDI but with 512 KB memory for MIDI samples, I doubt it could sound better than an AC'97 with MIDI emulation (at least those can use at least 4 MB for their patches).

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Ok i threw in a new soundblaster 32 ( i think , it's a few years old got it at walmart years ago ) and after installing the drivers off the CD (rather than using the xp installed ones) it sounds fucking great! At least compared to my ac97 audio. I mean i was sitting here blasting the fucking speakers just warping thru all the maps to hear it.

On another note, i downloaded the 30 megs of tim patches from that link you guys gave me to the idgames archives, but i cant seem to find a compiled win32 executable for tim anywhere. The timidity++ sourceforge page had a .bzh and .gz file, but as i just formatted i don't have winRAR installed like I normally do, can WinRAR open them? are they even windows binaries? I don't even feel like installing rar if it won't help (XP's zip utility doesn't open them).

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RottingZombie said:
On another note, i downloaded the 30 megs of tim patches from that link you guys gave me to the idgames archives, but i cant seem to find a compiled win32 executable for tim anywhere.

This page has the TiMidity++ binaries I currently have installed (v2.11.3), for Windows and in a ZIP.

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Ok i threw in a new soundblaster 32 ( i think , it's a few years old got it at walmart years ago )

Well, if it can accept midi instrument patches then it shouldn't be bad...I remember the original AWE32 was a fearsome, full length ISA beast :-p they later released a smaller, nerfed AWE32 lite :-(

Plus if it's an original Creative Labs soundblaster it should be top-notch compatible with nearly everything oldskool AND it should include an FM chip too, just in case ;-)

For a truly oldskool experience however, you shouldn't use anything above a 486 DX/66, with 8 (or even 4) MB of RAM :-)

Load it with MS-DOS v6.0 or greater, hit F5 at boot time, and enjoy the 1 minute long starting up time, as you struggle to keep the game above 25 fps limit by toggling high detail on/off and shrinking the view window ;-)

This, gentelemen, is true oldskool Doom, as oldskool as it gets. ;-)

To complete the feeling, don't use anything bigger than a 14" VGA monitor (maybe 15"), and use exclusively pre-1995 wads :-D

If you still aren't satisfied, use DOOM v1.1 registered if you can get hold of it ;-)

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Thanks guys I got the tim patches working with your help, glad for the tip that timidit is included in said ports.

I can't decide which i like better, the timidity with GUS patches or my default soundblaster sounds. I get alot of crackles and pops with the patches, while the SB defaults sound crisp and clear. But they both sound miles better than the crap Nvidia soundstorm and realtek onboard audio's that i'd been using over the years.

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The box im currently building has that same soundcard although im opting for a pentium 2 for added strength, because whats the point of wanting bad framerates? :P

Maes said:

Well, if it can accept midi instrument patches then it shouldn't be bad...I remember the original AWE32 was a fearsome, full length ISA beast :-p they later released a smaller, nerfed AWE32 lite :-(

Plus if it's an original Creative Labs soundblaster it should be top-notch compatible with nearly everything oldskool AND it should include an FM chip too, just in case ;-)

For a truly oldskool experience however, you shouldn't use anything above a 486 DX/66, with 8 (or even 4) MB of RAM :-)

Load it with MS-DOS v6.0 or greater, hit F5 at boot time, and enjoy the 1 minute long starting up time, as you struggle to keep the game above 25 fps limit by toggling high detail on/off and shrinking the view window ;-)

This, gentelemen, is true oldskool Doom, as oldskool as it gets. ;-)

To complete the feeling, don't use anything bigger than a 14" VGA monitor (maybe 15"), and use exclusively pre-1995 wads :-D

If you still aren't satisfied, use DOOM v1.1 registered if you can get hold of it ;-)